I love this guy Sam Zell – he’s just so funny and sharp. Zell is the real estate investment billionaire who sold his Equity Office Properties Trust to the Blackstone Group for $39 billion in the early part of 2007. He recently bought the Tribune Company, owner of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. The company also owns the Chicago Cubs major league baseball franchise. Zell is known for using colorful language during press conferences and speaking very clearly and succinctly in a straightforward …

Macro

More pain in the housing market anticipated as some homeowners find themselves “underwater” or owing more on their homes than what their homes are worth on the market. According to Mark Zandi at Economy.com (MCO), 10% of all homeowners currently face this negative equity situation. Zandi also sees home prices falling 20% as the economy worsens into a recession. Zandi could be underestimating the damage; homeowners abandon their homes and mortgages at a high rate when they enter negative territory on their equity. Foreclosures and abandoned mortgages exacerbate the problem …

Geeks have great t-shirts; why shouldn’t venture capitalists have some too? The love/hate relationship between VCs and entrepreneurs could tilt a little towards love if the VCs would ditch their light blue dress shirts for some of these funny, goofy t-shirts. On second thought, maybe not.

Suggestions:

“1% of the market, huh?”
“I’ll fund you – fo’ sho’” – inspired by that horribly laughable movie Superbad.
“You’re gonna make me rich”

Spring training has arrived – hard to believe that I’ll get to watch my Red Sox play for games that count in a couple months. The team has a good chance to improve on last year’s championship season because of the infusion of youth that Theo Epstein and his Ivy League staff are ushering in. Of course, old superstars like Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz will continue to carry the team. But, with Jacoby Ellsbury, Jon Lester, Dustin Pedroia, and Clay Buchholz projected to play major roles, the team seems …

As a Boston Red Sox fan (a long-suffering, loyal fan I might add), I’ve watched nervously Gary Sheffield‘s at-bats against my favorite team. Ever since moving over from the National League, he’s been a threatening presence at the plate against my boys from Boston, especially when he played for the hated New York Yankees. Only after John Henry, a wealthy hedge fund manager, bought the Red Sox and instilled a philosophy of scientific management based on sabermetrics did the Fenway Faithful enjoy the team’s recent dominance over the …

Macro

Between a rock and a hard place – that’s the scenario Ben Bernanke finds himself in as the economy decelerates drastically while inflation rises more than anticipated.

For the masochists, Nouriel Roubini proposes a perfect storm to demolish the financial markets. Of course, the probability of financial armageddon is extremely low, but you never know. Even if a handful of his scenarios come to fruition, the pain will be significant.

Do KKR Financial’s (KFN) woes signal further trouble for the private equity industry? During the height of the private equity boom, analysts …

Two finance professors from UCLA and the Helsinki School of Economics released a study exploring the correlation between individuals prone to getting speeding tickets and the tendency to churn investment portfolios. They conclude that an average investor’s portfolio saw an 11 percent increase in the turnover ratio for each additional ticket received. This is a highly significant finding according to statistical methods.
A couple of possible explanations the academics propose are overconfidence and thrill seeking behavior. Although overconfidence might play a small explanatory role, they find that the trait of thrill …

Advertising Age is reporting that U.S. media employment fell to a 15-year low in December 2007. The major driver behind this slump is the struggling newspaper industry. This is not surprising because nearly everyone is spending more time getting their news on the Internet and less with broadsheets. Exacerbating the losses is the disappearing classifieds business as online alternatives like craigslist, partially owned by eBay (EBAY) offer cheaper and more immediate classifieds solutions. The New York Times (NYT), also known as the Gray Lady to the cognoscenti, recently announced another …

 
Macro

Economic Indicators site to be shut down by U.S. Department of Commerce: Say goodbye to a very useful online resource due to “budgetary constraints” – lame excuse. The cost of administering a good website has diminished drastically. Enlightened government bureaucrats will still collect the data, but they don’t want to share it with private citizens.

William Ackman’s statement before Congress – The State of the Bond Insurance Industry: Interesting reading courtesy of fund manager who presciently shorted the real estate industry before the sub-prime meltdown became the crisis du jour.

Detroit home …

News Corporation (NWS-A) and its Myspace subsidiary announced the formation of an incubator named Slingshot Labs. It will be seeded with about $15 million to hire a team of software developers. The goal of Slingshot will be to create new Internet technologies and startups to bolster News Corporation’s properties in Web media, especially social networking giant Myspace.
Myspace has witnessed a significant slowing of growth while watching archrival Facebook achieve healthy expansion over the past year. Even Microsoft (MSFT) bought into the phenomenon by investing $240 million in Facebook at a …